Dumb question: if this can be used for 200 GHz electronics, why is it not useful for digital electronics? Is the power draw prohibitive or something?
IHP open source 130 nm BiCMOS PDK with 500 GHz fmax transistors
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Re: IHP open source 130 nm BiCMOS PDK with 500 GHz fmax transistors
#12Dumb question: if this can be used for 200 GHz electronics, why is it not useful for digital electronics? Is the power draw prohibitive or something?
200 ghz analog amplifiers, not 200 ghz digital logic. Very different circuit design rules.
Re: IHP open source 130 nm BiCMOS PDK with 500 GHz fmax transistors
#13Dumb question: if this can be used for 200 GHz electronics, why is it not useful for digital electronics? Is the power draw prohibitive or something?
Almost all logic today is done using CMOS for power reasons. The 200+ GHz stuff is all BJT, which while remarkably fast and less noisy, is generally much more power intensive (orders of magnitude). This makes BJT based designs useful for small to medium analog / RF blocks but not useful for designing a full blown modern microprocessor.
This process integrates both (pretty difficult to do for various physical process reasons) which allows you to combine the CMOS for things like power control and logic alongside the BJTs for extremely high speed analog circuitry.
Re: IHP open source 130 nm BiCMOS PDK with 500 GHz fmax transistors
#14This is a very fast BiCMOS process with both MOSFETs and bipolar transistors. Some digital logic can be implemented with MOSFETs but since they are 130 nm it's not very competitive with smaller cutting edge CMOS processes. Bipolar transistors are really the whole point of choosing this process and it's aimed for implementing analog and RF circuits. Bipolar transistors are extremely fast and can be used to make amplif…
Is there any FOSS you can use these PDKs with?
For this PDK there is only limited support (it is only in preview!) for klayout and ngspice - which are a FOSS layout tool and circuit simulator respectively. If you want to play with whats available, someone put up a colab script here:
https://colab.research.google.com/gist/proppy/f63686b02309e2...
The other two open PDKs, SKY130 and GF180MCU, have a more complete ecosystem the major tools being the opencircuitdesign suite, xschem and the OpenRoad project. If you're still interested, there's an easy to use docker container that has most of the tools in question already installed: